Fun and responsibility: A dress rarely comes alone

A dress rarely comes alone. Once you have one, another usually follows – and then another and another. Not only do clothes make people, as they say, they are also addictive.

A beautiful dress lasts forever, people think – and yet it has a certain half-life. It is a memory carrier – and so it sometimes reminds you that a time has passed. Sometimes you try to wear it anyway, even though you feel like your moment is over – and even though it still seems to fit, you feel like it’s already a thing of the past. Although the proportions have not changed, it no longer hugs the body as it once did.

Even if they are just hanging on the clothes rail, clothes always age the same way – for example because light falls on them. Some parts then fade, as if the clothes were standing on the same part of a stage like protagonists throughout their lives, illuminated at the same angle by the spotlight. They play the same piece throughout their lives, en suite, evening after evening, day after day. A professional deformation, like when a truck driver’s face is only tanned on one side.

Some of the clothes age particularly drastically because they are never worn. Just like the rubber on shoe soles breaks if not moved. What makes a dress age particularly badly: moths. To combat the moths, I now buy parasitic wasps because they are supposed to eat the moths. But who or what then eats the parasitic wasps?

I share the problem with moths with many others. A friend tells me that she only stores her clothes in garment bags and that she walks through the apartment with her family and claps her hands loudly. One by one, clap, clap, clap.

I’ve almost gotten used to it: I’m the woman with moth holes in my clothes. But: There is no need to flee forward. The moths have taken over my apartment and I hardly dare go in anymore.

You know the scenario of looking for a dress for an occasion. But: It’s not just certain occasions that require a certain wardrobe – some dresses are so strong, they have such an extraordinary will of their own that they literally create the moments in which they want to – and can – be worn. Where I come from, you almost always feel overdressed – at least that’s how I feel. And so I try to create opportunities to dress beautifully. You celebrate a party just to be able to wear a dress – not the other way around.

I imagine: Maybe one day I’ll get married just because of the wedding dress – I’m not marrying a person, but the dress itself. And I’m certainly not alone with this idea.

You remember certain moments in life when you smell a certain smell, baked goods for example, when you see a specific light, orange or light yellow. The appeal of memory is particularly strong when you eat a dish with which you associate a place or person. When you smell those smells, taste those flavors, or let yourself be blinded by that particular light, you often remember what clothes you were wearing, at that important or insignificant moment. A unique event or a forgotten ritual.

But what if you only remember the piece of clothing, if the dress is not a signifier of a specific meaningful event, but rather just “itself”. A thing in itself, as they say.

Some dresses only look the way they should in the opinion of the respective designer from a distance. You never perceive the dress you are wearing in its entirety – it falls apart into individual parts on your body. The wholeness of the dress is always imaginary.

I think of the announcer at Berlin Central Station, whom I watched for quite a while recently (my train was late, as always). She spoke into a small microphone and with a delay of about three seconds her voice echoed through the station hall. So she spent a whole long eight-hour shift listening to herself. The phenomenon of strangeness with which your own voice comes back to you was probably foreign to her. Sometimes I think it’s the same with memory – it comes back to you distorted and is so familiar that you often overlook it – or ignore it. Just like your favorite dress that covers your body like a second skin – it’s particularly dear to you because of its inconspicuousness. It’s only noticeable when the ice drips on it or when you have trouble taking it off again.

Even a dress is subject to a certain repetition compulsion – you put it on and take it off and put it on again, and sometimes other people take it off. Sometimes I remember a flashback: my mother, a giantess, pulls the dress over my head and jerks it up and down a little on the left and right of my body, she calls it “bagging up.” I resist and enjoy it at the same time and sometimes I say to her, “Bag me!”